In The Convent Of Little Flowers

In Shelter of Rain,an America-raised Indian adoptee prepares to return to the Convent of Little Flowers, where she once lived as an orphan, after receiving a letter from a nun claiming to be her aunt. Elderly Meha, in Three and A Half Seconds, reflects on the devastating consequences of giving her son everything modern society demands-and teaching him nothing the traditional world values-in the last moments of her life. The Key Club depicts the bewildered longing of Ram, one of Chennais eight most powerful men, for his best friends wife, who was the college sweetheart he abandoned as lower-class. And The Faithful Wife examines the influence and authority of ritual when a woman asks her journalist grandson to come back to his home village, to try and persuade his grandfather to stop the outlawed practice of Sati, where the community is about to force a twelve-year-old widow to burn alive in the ancient tradition. nbsp;The nine stories in this collection of tales skillfully explore the ties between friends, relatives, and the long fingers of the past. Each is a portrait of women and men struggling with the weight of hundreds of years of ingrained teaching on class, caste, and sexuality-just as their parents and grandparents were taught-as it clashes with the hopes and dreams of a population coming into the 21st century, with all of the freedoms that supposedly entails. Even the very names of the characters who people these pages are taken from Indian myth and legend, with consequences in the present day. Sundaresan writes with confidence and elegance, retaining the gorgeously evocative tone for which she has become known while infusing her newest work with the freshness of authenticity. As she describes in her authors note, the genesis of many of the stories told in In The Convent Of Little Flowers are the real-life tales, garnered through newspaper clippings or the stories told by neighbors. Young or old, rich or poor, high-class or low-caste, the characters in In The Convent Of Little Flowers represent the real faces of India today. Indu Sundaresans previous novels have sold over 100,000 copies, and the success of books like Monica Alis Brick Lane and Jhumpa Lahiris The Interpreter of Maladies proves that contemporary India is only rising on the screen of national awareness. In The Convent Of Little Flowers is sure to satisfy readers new and old-whether they are drawn by the authors past works, a fascination with the subject matter, or simply by the haunting, lyrical beauty of the stories themselves. About the AuthorIndu Sundaresan was born and raised in India, but emigrated to the United States for graduate school. Sundaresan is the author of three internationally-acclaimed and bestselling historical novels, The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses, and The Splendor of Silence, and currently lives in Redmond, Washington.

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